Britain goes into this general election a harsher country in which to live than it was 10 years ago. A decade of sweeping public spending cuts has destroyed any notion of a decent welfare safety net; services for the vulnerable have suffered eye-watering reductions in local government grants; schools and hospitals have been stretched beyond capacity.
Meanwhile, a government more concerned with signalling its toughness on immigration than upholding basic standards of decency has wrongly deported people who have legally lived and paid taxes in this country for decades and in the name of the hostile environment has introduced policies that have been ruled racially discriminatory by the courts. So the test for any manifesto for the next five years must be the extent to which it presents an alternative future for Britain that can win voters over in sufficient numbers to become reality.
There is no question that Labour’s manifesto, if enacted, would shift Britain on course to become a better and fairer place to live. There is a commitment to the modest spending increases the NHS urgently needs to alleviate a situation where patients are waiting for hours on trolleys, wards regularly go above safe capacity levels and pain-relieving operations are delayed. A Labour government would introduce free personal care at home for the over-65s, an important step towards ending the injustice that someone with a cancer diagnosis is taken care of by the state, whereas many diagnosed with dementia have to fund their own care. There will be welcome relief for schools.
To its credit, the manifesto does not stop at universal services: it pledges a commitment to end rough sleeping within five years, more money for services for vulnerable children and families, a far more humane approach to asylum and a radical programme to build more council housing. And embedded in the manifesto is a vision of a country that takes seriously its commitment to avoiding catastrophic global heating and where not only are people given more decent employment rights, but those rights are better enforced.
Unfair – but predictable – attacks include the idea that this marks a descent into divisive class warfare or an unsustainable expansion in the size of the state that will hold the country back. But Labour’s plans would take the size of the British state as a share of GDP to just above the OECD average. Asking those in the top 5% of income distribution to contribute more and bringing the taxation of income from wealth more in line with income from earnings are reforms that are long overdue.
There are however some questionable priorities: big, universal giveaways to pensioners, including the hugely expensive pledge to halt further increases in the state pension age; while the benefit freeze for working-age families is not fully reversed; a pledge to scrap tuition fees, disproportionately benefiting the highest-earning graduates, but barely any thinking about how to support the social transition to adulthood for young people who do not go to university. Nor has Labour come clean about the cost of an expansion in the state. We strongly believe better universal services and a more comprehensive safety net are worth paying for. But Labour has effectively promised the majority of voters they can have this at little personal cost, while businesses and the top 5% pick up the tab. People would be right to be sceptical, especially when the economy is threatened by Brexit (over which the party is ambiguous). Some of the justifiable increases in corporation tax would almost certainly be passed on to voters of average means through suppressed wages, higher prices and poorer pensions. Labour is also silent about who would pick up the extra £24bn in state pension costs by the 2050s that would result from halting further increases in the state pension age. Its admirable pledge of genuinely affordable homes cannot realistically be achieved without declining house prices relative to earnings, which will affect far more than just the top 5%.
Another weakness is a blind faith in public sector provision. There is a good case for nationalising natural monopolies such as rail, where services have been appalling, and water, where consumers have been ripped off by private-equity-owned companies. But as the poor quality of some nationalised industries in the 1970s attests, nationalisation is not in of itself a guarantee that things will get better, particularly when Labour has committed to nationalising great swaths of industry within five years. It would do far better to prioritise those sectors where privatisation has worked worst and doing it well.
When it comes to public services, the heartbreaking numbers of avoidable baby and mother deaths at Shrewsbury and Telford NHS trust over 30 years serve as a stark reminder that state-provided services are not always first-class; they can be life-threateningly bad. Labour’s commitment to abolish Ofsted and testing in primary schools, without giving details of what would replace these forms of accountability for schools, could risk taking us back to an era in which low-income areas are served by poor-quality schools, with neither parents nor government the wiser until it is far too late. Ultimately, the radical nature of this manifesto cannot just be judged by what it promises on paper – the test is the extent to which its pledges are enacted. The risk is that it contains so much that voters simply do not believe it can be achieved within five years, and with good reason. It reads like a 20-year, not a five-year, programme for government, with little indication what a Labour government would prioritise in order to avoid delivering things badly, in a way that could be utterly self-defeating.
There is no doubt that the Britain envisaged in Labour’s manifesto would be a far better, kinder and greener country in which to live. But the question it raises is whether it makes a convincing enough case to voters that a Labour government could actually deliver it.
